Freud, Women, and Society by J. O. Wisdom New Brunswick, NJ:  Transaction, 1992,  xi + 149 pp., $24.95

This book is the work of a philosopher of mature years who has written a number of papers dealing with psychoanalysis and now reflects on the subject in an expanded way. It contains reprints of all or parts of five of his previously published writings. Although the book itself has no unifying theme, there is an attempt to organize the internal structure into three main parts. Unfortunately, what emerges is a hodgepodge of Wisdom's challenging ideas intermingled with his “folksy,” distracting asides and digressions.

Part I, “Loose Ends Left By Freud,” contains commentary on 12 topics. These include The Female Castration-Complex, Sublimation, The Libido Theory, Narcissism, The Oedipus Complex, and Trauma Re-enactment Dreams. Part II, “Bisexuality,” is divided into four chapters: Male and Female, The Psychical Self of Havelock Ellis, The Diagnosis of Darwin's Illness, and Psychoanalysis Bypasses Homosexuality. The final section, “Women, Men, and Society,” contains Sex to Androgyne, Women, Men, and Review.

In the latter two-thirds of the book, Wisdom develops an idea he calls androgyne, a concept he culled from Aristophanes, Freud, and Jung. Briefly, this states that man has something female at his core and woman has something male at hers. This idea cannot be explained by biology alone but is the result of complex interactions of biology and societal influences and developments and can be seen in such characteristics as firmness in women and tenderness in men. Men, however, are greatly upset when attention is called to their femininity. Women, on the other hand, are not disturbed by the corresponding charge. These reactions he explains on the basis of breast envy and penis envy, respectively. Acknowledgment of breast envy is extremely disturbing, according to Wisdom, because it threatens a male's manhood. For the male to put his breasts to use would lead to fellatio, which is incompatible with